Visions for Racial Equality: David Clement Scott and the Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth-Century Malawi by Harri Englund

Abstract

aftermath of independence, and the early twentieth century. The second grouping has chapters about the British and U.S. formal and informal empires in Latin America, the role of internal colonialism in shaping those empires, and the changing British views of Latin American revolutions. Its chapters about the Mexican Revolution in comparative global perspective include an interesting and convincing discussion of the similarities between Plutarco Elías Calles and Kemal Atatürk—especially their “Jacobinism,” as Knight calls their particularly vehement revolutionary anticlericalism. The book takes the roles of religion, anticlericalism, and the Catholic Church seriously, much more so than do Knight’s classic volumes on the Mexican Revolution. Yet even though culture, and especially religion and church, is more present in this volume than in Knight’s early output, these essays nonetheless remain fundamentally rooted in the social-science approaches that have consistently shaped his work. Knight’s way of making sense of the “sprawling, shape-shifting thing we call ‘liberalism’” (64), for example, is to identify three “generations” of liberalism across time, the last of which, in the late nineteenth century, splits into three different types—developmental, social, and anarcho. Knight then analyzes these different generational liberalisms from three cross-cutting angles—political economy and class relations, culture (religious and popular), and nationalism. Using these categories as conceptual tools, he produces a compelling comparison of the histories of Latin American liberalism. Every chapter proceeds in a similar way. The goal of identifying and categorizing historical patterns is to reveal complexity, not to emerge with a homogenizing generalization. Most scholars who cover all of Latin America use this process to elucidate complexity and pattern, as well as structure and contingency, but few do so as well as Knight does in this valuable set of essays.